Self-sufficient
community can be defined as group of people consist of many classes of social
life that has particular role to support the independency to sufficed its
people’s principle commodity. In plural culture of civilization like Indonesia,
community will contain people from wide range of social and regional backgrouds,
but still we can be sure that basic human needs regardless of its social and
regional background won’t be much different from each other. They will need
acces to food, water, energy, clothes and home. But above all, they will need
‘acces-power’ from money, place to
actualize theirself up, and something that gives them certainity and sustained
future in every condition even when economy recess strikes again someday. At
this point, entrepreneurship will become a solution, especially small-medium
entrepreneurship that is based on its social and human capacity. Or we can call
it sociopreneurship / Social-entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is
the form of activity that chase profit based on original idea and led by one or
a group of leaders independent from other companies. Entrepreneurship usually
doesn’t need big amount of money to start , which is much easier to get
compared to big industry. For example, one of the village at Pangalengan
collecting money from its people for capital money of milk and beef
commercialisation activity to outer world. They also establish natural
strawberry field and farm tour for familly recreation, optimizing
‘back-to-nature’ slogan. Social entrepreneurship is the type of
entrepreneurship which the profit is not the only and priority purpose. Its
very purposes are to optimally exploit human resource so that won’t be any
unemployed left, and to invest the profit for further business expansion or
giving it back to the people that are working together in every level. In
community that apply theory of soical entrepreneurship, economy recess will not
be an issue that endanger them. In this community, they will tend to have more
and more variably kind of businesses since they will always be new labor force
to be exploited and more capital to invest. And in the end, this wil bear into
less dependance community which is be able to suffice its own principle needs
by its own potentials.
To start
entrepreneurship, regardless what type of entrepreneurship it is, a community
must have short term vision and long term vision. And both of them are
manifested on a grandplan. Smart,time-based, and result-based grandplan.
Sometimes, the substantial idea attached on that grand plan doesn’t require
originality alone, what it need is sustainable and optimized way of doing
something. And technology and applied science are there to complete it. I will
elaborate simple example out of it, in junior high school i conduct observasion
study to the village near my school about how they make salty eggs (telur asin), its whole process. After
that, my biology teacher explain me and my fellow researchers scientific
process and the very substantial step that they dont do on making this salty
eggs. That was based in capilarity and osmosis-diffusion principle that needs
firm tissue to optimize salt-water infiltrating eggs’ shell, and we make
experiment out of it. Long story shorted, it result on longlasting, good-smell,
and soft texture salty eggs (which usually isnt). The point of the story is,
there are many entrepreneurships in the world that ‘coincidentally’ involved
science in it, but only few of them that know exactly they involve science in
it. And only the latter ones can make the so-called “sustainable and optimized
way of doing something”. Because such a fundamental thing like science won’t
stop giving us inpiration to develop and optimize works-mastermind, and process
engineering will be much easier if we know the fundamental works behind it.
Actually, to apply
and use technology, we don’t have to spend to much money to invest. Technology
is all about exploiting principle way of scientific phenomenon, and sometimes
even with principle mastermind and traditional raw material alone can realize
the technology. Chemical Engineering Student on the early 2000’s made biogas
plant only from simple ground-pit near farm, sheets of plastic paper, used
drum, used ducts, and traditional stove for extracting biogas from kettle’s
faeces. There’s no need to make aluminium-coated vessel, blast furnace, and
other advanced technologies. And with it, it can suffice 2-3 famillies energy
demmand for heating water and cooking food. The point is, we only need best
practice principle and the spirit to use some technologies, regardless the
situation. Because by aplying cheap technology and applied sciences, it will
make remarkable ways of entrepreneurship as trigger to self-sufficient community.
As it was written in
‘my reason and objectives of joining this seminar’ column, to make the
unthinkale thinkable for a community, they need us, the educated student and
future leaders. Sometimes we have to be the trigger for them to see the
potentials they always have, and they also need us to enlighten them about best
practice of entrepreneurship as creator of self-sufficient community. And last
but not least, of course our knowledge and familiarity to science and technolgy
as Technology College Student will be stepstones for community to continually
apply and use science&technology. In the college years, i got into two kind
of activity to develop the community. The first one is still the same with high
school years, giving applicable knowledge and working on some structural
establishment to stimulate people do it by themselves independently. The second
one, is the movement to get people in every level of civilization to be smartly
and democratically involved in every government’s maneuvers by enlighting them
with newest issues and political education. Those are the simplification about
the role youth have to take in this matter.
